RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/05/31/britain-should-take-lesson-trump-slash-taxes/

When President Trump arrives on Monday, he will encounter a broken prime minister and an economy stuck in a growth rut. Tory leadership contenders would do well to listen to him, for Trump’s economic policies have achieved what current chancellor Philip Hammond has not.

Look at the contrast. In the first quarter of 2019 the British economy grew at an annualised 2.0pc – the US expanded by 3.2pc. Since 2016, the US economy has grown at 2.55pc a year – the UK averaged 1.6pc. If current rates are maintained, the US will have opened a 4.6pc cumulative growth gap by 2020. What Americans get in four years, Britons will wait seven for.

Leadership election promises of world-class schools and hospitals are a dead letter unless accompanied by fresh thinking to revive economic growth. That requires answering the productivity puzzle: why productivity growth has dwindled to virtually nothing since the crisis. Over the last four years, growth in output per worker in the UK averaged a dismal 0.6pc a year and output per hour actually declined in the last two quarters. Ten-year productivity growth from 2007 was negative for the first time in almost a century.

Weak economic performance demands bold policies. Trump’s explicitly set out to maximise employment, production and purchasing power by, in the words of his 2019 Economic Report, “providing maximum scope for the efficiency of free enterprise and competitive market mechanisms”.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/05/30/course-london-no-longer-english-city-rest-country-needs-ever/?li_source=LI&li_medium=li-recommendation-widget

It was, I suppose, inevitable that John Cleese should get it in the neck for restating the blindingly obvious – that London is no longer an English city. The former Monty Python and Fawlty Towers star was only telling a truth that has long been recognised by foreign tourists, and indeed by just about everyone else with a modicum of worldly awareness. 

If you want a picture postcard caricature of what most people think of as England, you are much more likely to find it outside the capital than within the bounds of the M25. London is a global city, with more in common with New York and the other great metropolises of the world than much of its own hinterland. 

This is not a particularly new phenomenon; as early as the thirteenth century there are recorded complaints of London as an unrecognisable city, back then on account of supposedly being overrun by Moors. Today they come from all over the world; in my particular borough there are apparently more than 50 spoken languages. We have become a veritable tower of Babel.

To point this out is, however, to invite a tirade of condemnation from all the usual suspects. How dare Mr Cleese say that multicultural London is not England.

Time to get real. On so many levels, it is manifestly obvious that London is a world apart from much of the rest of the country, right down to the great Brexit divide, where support for leaving the European Union is at its highest outside the capital. Most Londoners would by some margin prefer to remain. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/orbans-switch-back-to-the-center-right/

The European election results were fairly clear — the mainstream centrist parties declined again; the Greens and Left-Liberals benefited from this and rose in much of Western Europe; and the populists gained too in France, Poland, Italy, and Hungary, but not quite as well as expected elsewhere. (For a deeper dive into these events and their significance, see my column here). Not all is clear, however. A pall of obscurity hangs over the “populist” parties, not only about what they believe but even about what should they be called.

Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin have written a good book about them — National Populism. While they concede that there are quite deep ideological divides between different parties, arising from their different national political cultures, they put them all into the same box labelled “national populism.” That’s not an unfair label. Indeed, many analysts in the European media, being left-liberal and acting on the principle of “No Friends to the Right,” calls them many much more hostile names.

But the term “populism” reflects the earliest stage in the rise of these parties when they were essentially protest parties angry that remote liberal elites had misgoverned their countries and avoided being held to account for their failures. Populists were then groping towards an understanding of what went wrong and how to put it right. The longer they are around in politics — and most European countries now have populists in their parliaments — they develop more serious analyses and more positive policies. If they don’t manage that, they will eventually disappear as the voters move on from being angry to wanting problems solved. And if they do, we will discover the color of their political philosophy and give them a different and more informative name.

https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/05/article/washington-is-wrong-about-chinas-economy/

Americans want to believe that their economy is doing well and that China’s economy is doing badly, as President Trump keeps saying. One shouldn’t blame Trump for this – underestimating competitors is America’s national pastime.

A recent embarrassing example was a report by Wells Fargo analyst Roger Read featured on CNBC, claiming that a fall in the growth rate in China’s diesel consumption “is most likely tied to economic factors and the effects of the tariff ‘war’ with the US.”

As physicist Wolfgang Pauli once said, this isn’t even wrong. The fellow from Wells Fargo failed to observe that China’s rail traffic is growing 10%, year-on-year, which is also the rate of expansion of China’s rail network. The more China ships by rail, the less dependent it is on diesel trucks.

The relationship is robust statistically (I’ll spare you the econometrics, which show that lagged values for changes in diesel demand predict changes in rail traffic). The analyst also failed to observe that heavy truck sales reached an all-time record in March 2019, driven by vehicles powered by natural gas.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273888/glazov-video-uk-police-escort-muslim-mob-attack-frontpagemagcom

In this new Jamie Glazov Video, Jamie discusses UK Police Escort Muslim Mob to Attack Tommy, and he sheds a disturbing and tragic light on When Britain died.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch Tommy Robinson reveal “If They Murdered Me,” where he exposes how the UK authorities deliberately put him in harm’s way:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/boris-johnson-is-being-prosecuted-over-a-campaign-slogan/

Britain’s censors have found yet another silencing tool.

Britain is a country where tweeting, preaching, or posting the wrong thing can get someone in trouble with the police. Under the circumstances, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Boris Johnson, one of the most prominent of those who campaigned for the U.K. to leave the EU — and now a possible leader of the Conservative party — is facing prosecution for the official Leave campaign’s claim that the U.K. sent “the EU £350 million a week.” This was money, Vote Leave asserted, that could be used to help fund the perpetually needy National Health Service, a claim that was plastered along the side of its big red campaign bus.

It was also a claim that — like many others made by both sides in the course of the referendum campaign — was not quite as accurate as, shall we say, it might have been. Although it is true that Britain’s notional EU bill was then about £350 million a week (in fact a little more), that figure was quoted before taking account of the annual deduction that Mrs. Thatcher had first secured for the U.K. back in the 1980s and, for that matter, other payments channeled to Britain via Brussels. After adjusting for all that, Britain’s real weekly contribution was probably a little more than half the infamous £350 million.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-chinas-war-on-christians-11559256446

June 4, 1989, was a seminal day for China’s faithful, as the Chinese government massacred thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The same day, Communist Party leaders watched as pro-democracy candidates in Poland supplanted Communist rule—with Pope John Paul II’s indispensable support. Together the events jolted Beijing into tightening its control over religion.

Post-Tiananmen, Christian groups were made to register with state “patriotic” associations or risk punishment as “evil cults.” Anxious to maintain access to Western markets, Beijing selectively enforced these rules in large cities. The rural Christian underground bore the brunt of church closings and mass internment of their members in labor camps.

Chinese Christianity still experienced spectacular growth in the next 30 years. Today there could be well over 100 million Chinese Christians. All but 36 million practice their faith outside government control. Purdue sociologist Fenggang Yang has projected that China could have nearly 250 million Christians by 2030. The Communist Party numbers 90 million.

President Xi Jinping last year began enforcing religious regulations to rein in church growth and bend Christian belief to party dictates. Mr. Xi gave direct control of churches to the officially atheistic Communist Party. Some urban underground megachurches were shut down. Thousands of congregants were arrested and several prominent Protestant pastors received lengthy prison sentences. Earlier this month, the regime launched a nationwide campaign to eradicate unregistered churches.

Mr. Xi calls this policy “sinicization.” The goal is to make religions “instruments of the Party,” the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions asserts. The government confirmed this when it inadvertently posted internal documents—downloaded by ChinaAid, a nonprofit Christian human-rights organization—revealing that it intended to “contain the overheated growth of Christianity.”

Last year in Henan province, 10,000 Protestant churches were ordered shut, even though most were registered with the state. During 2018, more than one million Christians were threatened or persecuted and 5,000 arrested. Among them is an American permanent resident, Pastor John Sanqiang Cao, 60, who is serving seven years for “organizing illegal border crossings” to deliver aid in Myanmar. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/29/investigation-reveals-doubling-nhs-rationing-cataract-surgery/

NHS rationing of cataract operations has doubled in just two years, with patients increasingly denied cases until they are at risk of blindness, an investigation reveals.

Charities warned of “shocking” restrictions, which are in defiance of national guidance.

The figures from across the country show a sharp increase in the number of areas where the NHS is refusing to fund the operations until vision is badly compromised.

It comes despite warnings from the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence that the NHS must not rely on sight tests to decide whether surgery is warranted.

Experts say the rise of rationing is leaving vulnerable pensioners in misery and isolation, and increasing their risk of suffering falls.

The research, published in the BMJ, found that in 2018/19, 22 per cent patients in England referred for cataract surgery were forced to go through tests to establish how poor their vision first. This is a rise from 6 per cent in 2016/17.

And almost 2,900 cases were rejected – a rise from 1,301 refusals two years earlier.